Archive for October, 2014

The leaves are changing, and the fall soccer season finished up this weekend. Both boys had tournaments in different cities, so it was busy, but the weather was beautiful. We were even treated to 5 hot air balloons flying over Nicholas’ game this morning.

I came close to reaching my goal of finishing the letters of Nicholas’ name…

Now that I have some good soccer ball fabric, I’ve been able to put together the beginnings of what I hope will be a warm soccer-watching quilt. I cut some 5″ squares of the soccer ball fabric and laid them out with the first three appliqué letters to see how it might look:

I think I’m going to need to lay out all (or at least more) of the appliqués blocks in order to decide how I want to arrange the other blocks – in some kind of pattern or randomly? So, to that end, my goal for next week is to appliqué one letter a day so that by next weekend I will have all of Nicholas’ name finished.

In other news, we returned to school this past week after fall break. Everyone was a little tired the first few days, but we got back into the routine and things are going well. My 2nd year students are, for the most part, getting a handle on the dative case. We made a foldable in class Tuesday to practice for the speaking part of their Unit Test, which they took on Thursday.

This weekend is homecoming for IU. They play Michigan State in football, which isn’t likely to go well, but we did have beautiful weather on Friday afternoon, and I was able to go for a long run.

Last weekend, while I was watching a soccer game in chilly weather, I was struck with inspiration for my next quilting project: a warm quilt for soccer game watching. Since Nicholas’ and Andrew’s club soccer team colors are red and white, I decided to use red and tan. Here’s what I found in my stash:

My plan is to do some machine applique letters to spell the kids’ names, soccer, and their club name, Cutters.

I haven’t done any machine applique in a while, so my first practice letter wasn’t great, but after I looked up the directions for how to pivot on inside and outside corners, things went much better.

Since it was fall break, I had quite a bit of time to work on it, especially since the weather was bad and the kids were visiting grandparents for the first part of the week. I really wanted to find some good soccer print fabric, and I went to all 3 fabric stores in town but didn’t find anything I liked.

I did do a few other things besides sewing during fall break, such as cleaning out some closets and making cinnamon rolls. Yum!

On Saturday Andrew had a soccer tournament in Indianapolis, and there was enough time between games to visit one of the quilt stores. They had just what I was looking for:

We’re on fall break next week, so I’m looking forward to having some sewing time. I’ve been thinking about making another reusable shopping bag. I started looking through my scraps and found some fabric left over from Mira and Audra’s quilts. That led me to the blue flower fabric, which is extra from Anna’s quilt, and I have quite a bit of it and some coordinating fabrics. We’ll see what I end up doing…

My week started out well – when I walked into my room Monday morning, this was waiting for me on my desk:

My laminating order was finished!!! My school just switched over from do-it-yourself laminating to “we’ll do it for you so people stop breaking the laminator.” I couldn’t be happier – I’ve always been intimidated by the laminator and afraid of being the one to break it, so I hadn’t tried to use it yet. Now I can just leave it up to the pros.

Later in the week we found out that our new photocopier was even better that we had first thought:

It punches holes!!! I’ve never heard of a copier doing that. Wow! For people like me who do guided notes and hole punch them to encourage students to keep them organized in a binder, this is fantastic! As you can see, we’re still plugging along with the dative case – the last part, dative prespositions!

Fall arrived almost overnight this weekend. On Thursday it was 80 degrees, and by Saturday morning it was in the low 40s for Nicholas’ soccer game. The leaves are starting to change, too.